The Congressional Research Service (CRS) which is the research division of Congress known for its objective studies, has issued a report on the effects of patent trolls on innovation and the economy.

The study shows that the US patent system is completely stuffed and there is far too much trollage for the nation's good. It points out that patent trolls are litigious entities that don't usually create new products or come up with new ideas.

Armed with often overbroad and vague patents, the trolls send out threatening letters to those they argue are infringing, it says. According to the CRS report defendants settle because patent litigation is risky, disruptive, and expensive, regardless of the merits.

Many trolls set royalty demands strategically well below litigation costs to make the business decision to settle an obvious one. “Businesses lose both time and money, and innovation suffers,” the report said.

Publication of the CRS report could be important because it indicates that Congress might be taking a stand against the trolls.

The increasingly paranoid French-backed Junta which overthrew its lawful King a while back and started calling itself the United States of America, is taking steps to prevent citizens from replacing it with something more democratic.

The US government has looked at what happened in the popular uprisings in the Mideast and North Africa, and is terrified that its corporate oligarchic republicanism could go the same way. According to a Homeland Securit Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of social networking technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity.

According to Boing Boing Wagner is trying to figure out how you use things like Twitter as a source. "How do you establish trends and how do you then capture that in an intelligence product?" she pondered.

Wagner said Homeland Security was working out guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on US citizens and protect privacy, she claimed.